1 answer

There are several good reasons for using headers and subheaders. The two most important reasons is that this helps the page display properly for incoming readers, which leads to the second reason – accessibility for all people. Many of Wikipedia’s visitors use screen readers that process the text and turn it into a braille or audio format. If the headers aren’t formatted properly – or don’t exist at all – it makes it much, much harder for them to access the material, especially in very large pages.

That said, here is how you create headers and subheaders via source mode and VisualEditor. Remember – only the first word in a header should be capitalized unless the header is the name of a person, place, or title. (IE, Robin Williams, Republic of Ireland, Guardians of the Galaxy)

Source mode

To create a subheading in source mode, all you need to do is write the following:

==Your subheader title==

This will create a main header for the topic page. If you want to create subheaders within the section, you can add more equal signs, like as follows:

===Smaller subheader===

====Even smaller subheader====

If you save the page or select "preview", it should look like this:

I recommend using preview if you're unsure of your edits, as this will allow you to look at your edits and determine if everything looks right.

Visual Editor

I personally prefer using VisualEditor for editing since it allows you to get a better idea of what the page will look like while you’re editing and it’s easier to detect errors prior to saving the page.

To get a subheader using this process all you need to do is hit the little white box that says "paragraph" - this will bring up a variety of options as follows:

This shows you a variety of subheadings that you can use - however you should note that when you make a new subsection you should start with "heading" since that will bring up the large subheader that marks a new section.